It used to be, just a few years ago, that having a nice real estate website was all you needed to start generating leads from the Internet.Today that is no longer the case.Your customers may be searching for a listing with Google Search, or go to one of the classified portals like Craigslist, Zillow, Trulia, etc.or, “hang out” and learn about home buying or selling on their favorite social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, ActiveRain etc.To maintain a steady stream of leads you will need to “fish” in all these places for clients and connect with them before your competition does.

The RealBird Listing Publisher provides a convenient way for agents in the member area to quickly share their listings on social networks and social bookmarking sites after publishing it. The chart below shows the sharing habits - the distribution of sharing destinations - of the RealBird listings. Since this particular sharing service is different than the one available on the RealBird single property websites and used only by RealBird members, the chart represents the importance of these destinations as decided by real estate professionals.

The second chart shows the sharing distribution by consumers from the single property websites. This stats might include RealBird member agents as well, so it represents a different data set. Facebook and Twitter rule as well, but LinkedIn is #2. I suspect that LinkedIn sharing - being a professional network - is used by the RealBird member agents again and not by consumers.

We are now streaming RealBird listings to 3 new platforms, MyBlogLog, Twitter and FriendFeed. All 3 have some distinct set of features and we shall see which one will be the most appealing for people to interact around topics related to RealBird and the properties advertised.

A service by Yahoo, MyBlogLog started as a smart widget to create mini communities on blogs and to add face to faceless website and blog visitors. Since then, it grew into a powerful lifestreaming, and general social networking platform. If you are a MyBlogLog user, join our MyBlogLog communities. All RealBird listings are automatically streamed here through the SearchOnMaps.com property search engine.

Pros: Lifestreaming is getting better and Google indexes the content fast and the photo "footprint" is a must-have for every real estate agent (consider it your grocery card photo banners online, for free)Cons: The community messaging is still very basic and unintuitive, and is mostly used for messaging to blog readers, i.e. a one way communication from authors of the community to their readers.

We are now streaming your listings as they are posted to Twitter as well. Our twitter username is realbird and you can send us tweets, follow or interact with ours.

Pros: The simplest way to get in touch with us

Cons: The power of twitter is the limitation of the message length allowed. It forces people to summarize what they have to say. That might also be a disadvantage as a forum platform, but for some sort of conversation between you and us, it may be the quickest way. We shall see.

FriendFeed started as an aggregator of users' and their friend's social network feeds and enabled them to track the merged online activities all at one place. Eventually, FriendFeed became a major hub for liquid conversation, i.e. a place where people engage around a topic streamed from 3rd party sites, blog and media. One of the most intuitive implementation I've seen so far and it tends to be less noisy than Twitter. We have created a RealBird Room on FriendFeed. We stream our blogs and the RealBird listings here as well. Use this forum to add your likes and dislikes about our service, comments on existing posts and interact with other RealBird users. Once you joined the Room (free), you can send us an email with your blog feed and we will add it to the community (assuming you are a RealBird member and real estate professional)

Consider these services as new ways to start discussions about RealBird, our product features and best practices and to interact with fellow RealBird members. We are going to set up communities (or groups) on ActiveRain and Facebook too and eventually we will see which platform the most conversations will emerge on.

A theoretical overview of social networks by faberNovel Consulting . Note the distinction between networks of self expression ( The Platform or "fantasized identity" as they call it ) like MySpace and networks providing services on real-world social graphs ( The Utility or "real identity") like FaceBook and LinkedIn

This is a great overview for real estate professionals. Online marketing is bending toward social networks and it is crucial to understand the driving forces and purposes of those today, in order to design and execute effective marketing strategies in the future.